Ordering products from retailers over the internet for home delivery or in-store pickup is an extremely popular way of shopping. Fulfilling such orders in a timely, accurate and efficient manner is logistically challenging to say the least. Clicking the “check out” button in a virtual shopping cart creates an “order.” The order includes a listing of items that are to be shipped to a particular address or held at a retail location for pickup by the customer. The process of “fulfillment” involves physically taking or “picking” these items from a retail environment open to in-store customers, packing them, and either shipping them to the designated address or staging them at a specified on-site location for customer pickup. An important goal of the order-fulfillment process in a retail environment is thus to pick and pack as many items in as short a time as possible without negatively impacting the in-store shopping experience.
The order-fulfillment process typically takes place in a retail environment containing many products, including those listed in the order. Among the tasks of order fulfillment is therefore that of traversing the retail environment to find and collect the various items listed in an order. In addition, the products that will ultimately be shipped or staged first need to be received in the retail environment and stocked (placed) on retail display shelving in an orderly fashion throughout the retail environment so they can be readily retrieved both by in-store customers and by pickers fulfilling orders for shipping or in-store pickup.
In a retail environment, the goods that are being delivered and ordered can be stored far apart from each other and dispersed among a great number of other goods. An order-fulfillment process using only human operators to place and pick the goods requires the operators to do a great deal of walking and can be inefficient and time consuming. Since the efficiency of the fulfillment process is a function of the number of items shipped per unit time, increasing time reduces efficiency and increases the number of employees required to perform the picking tasks.
In retail environments, placing and picking of items is typically performed by retail employees such as surplus cashiers, floor associates, stock associates, etc. That is, generally, specialized “pickers” are not typically available in a retail environment. Thus, a high volume of in-store pickup or in-store picking of orders to be shipped can result in a need to increase staffing levels, thereby increasing costs. Alternatively, if staffing levels are not sufficiently increased, the in-store customer experience is negatively impacted due to retail employees being preoccupied with picking tasks and thus inattentive to in-store customers.